These free sign-ups are going to be the foundation on which you build the rest of the course.

Interact with the people taking the course. Start a forum and encourage the free users to share what they liked and didn’t like about the content. Most importantly, figure out what it is they want to learn and use this to build out the rest of your course.

By pre-selling your course you are better prepared to build something that people will actually purchase by the time you put a price-tag on it.

In 2013 we released a small, free introductory course (as a gateway) to a paid course. Over 800 people signed-up in one-month. We didn’t advertise it heavily and never mentioned it to LearnDash users. There was just a small link to it on our blog at the time. We gathered feedback but ultimately shifted our resources back to the software itself. We may revisit the idea.